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99 Coffins, the Interview

posted by Matt Knicl at 6:00 am.

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I Got 99 Problems But A Vamp Ain’t One

I’m a fan of vampires in all their forms; from the B-movie clichés of Buffy to the oversexed “Jean Claudes” of Laurell K. Hamilton. I’ve taken a class of the history of vampires and have dozens of books and comics featuring these undead fiends.

But what irks me is that when I ask many people about vampires - those who claim to be fans of the genre - have not even read Dracula. They’ve seen Interview with a Vampire and maybe read I Am Legend. Big whoop, I say. Vampires are part of a larger tradition than any one author and their legacy is rooted in the myths of Eastern Europe - myths of horrible, homicidal beasts that lurked in the night.

Author David Wellington gets that. I interviewed Mr. Wellington regarding his new novel, 99 Coffins, a novel that gets back to roots of vampire fiction.

Matt Knicl: What draws you to supernatural thrillers?

David Wellington: My mother is a voracious reader and she also hates censorship. Back in the seventies, when I was just a kid, she would read all the Stephen King novels and then put them in a pile. She would tell me I could read them if I wanted to, but that they might give me nightmares. As you can imagine, I read them the second she was done with them. She was right, they did give me scary dreams–but they also showed me exactly what I wanted to do with my life!

Matt: You got your MFA from Penn State. Was that for Writing?

David: Yeah, I got an MFA in Creative Writing. I also got two Bs my first semester, which they told me meant I would never be able to get a teaching job. That forced me to find another way to make money with my writing, though it took years and years before it happened.

Matt: Did you find your taste in fiction opposing to the traditional ‘literary’ fiction genres of academia?

David: Very much so. I was sitting in workshops with other writers who felt that plot wasn’t important in a modern novel, and who turned up their noses at any trace of genre fiction. It ended up being a very valuable experience, however, as it forced me to write stories outside of my comfort zone–mainstream stories–and then go home after class and write my own stuff in my free time. My fiction improved immeasurably, both from what I was being taught and from what I ended up teaching myself. The only real way to learn how to write well is to write badly for a long time and learn from your mistakes.

Matt: Can you describe 99 Coffins?

David: It’s the second book in a trilogy about Laura Caxton, a Pennsylvania highway patrol cop who reluctantly ends up fighting vampires. Not your Anne Rice style vampires, either, but huge, hairless beasts who live for nothing but blood. They’re predators, pure and simple–they don’t write poetry. They don’t drink wine. They rip your head off and drink out of the stump. In the first book she thought she drove them to extinction. In the second volume she finds a cave where a hundred of them were buried in suspended animation a hundred and forty years ago, during the Battle of Gettysburg. Before she can figure out why they were put down there or what to do next, she realizes that one of the coffins is empty–meaning that one of the vampires is on the loose. They nearly killed her the last time. They did kill people who were important to her and drove her right to the edge of madness in her fight for survival, and that was back when she was just assisting the legendary vampire hunter Jameson Arkeley. This time she’s on her own.

Matt: How do you see vampires?

David: Well, that depends–do they see me first? Vampires are supposed to be scary, first and foremost. A lot of writers seem to have forgotten that.

Matt: There is a ton of vampire literature out there, yet hundreds of vampire books are released a year it seems. How did you approach writing about them?

David: I wrote 13 Bullets largely because I was sick of reading endless novels about sexy vampires and romantic vampires and sympathetic vampires and vampires with hearts of gold… just to get back on track, I went back and read Dracula. Now that was a scary vampire. I wanted to show people that they could still chill your blood before they drank it, basically. So I stripped out all the silly, melodramatic, soap opera nonsense and created my own kind of vampires. They live forever, but if they don’t drink blood constantly they age even faster than we do. When they do drink blood, they got stronger, and crazier, and nearly bulletproof. Your only chance is to destroy their hearts before they can eat you, and they go out of their way to make that difficult for you.

Matt: Why did you choose the Civil War as your novel’s backdrop?

David: Only a fraction of the book is set during the Civil War, but it’s crucial to understanding where the vampires come from and what they really want. If there was ever a Gothic war in history, the Civil War was it–a time when the popular imagination was possessed of a morbid fascination with death, even as the technology of warfare had improved to the point where old-fashioned notions of honor and chivalry were useless against massive cannons and large-caliber firearms that could shatter your bones and blow your head off without warning. Originally it was going to just be a small bit of backstory, that the vampire had been alive and active in the nineteenth century. When I started reading about the war, however, I knew there was an amazing story there that needed to be told. In the book it takes the form of a series of letters and journal entries written by Union soldiers in the days before the Battle of Gettysburg, which is also an echo of Dracula, which is written entirely in that epistolary style.

Matt: This is the second book in a trilogy, the first being 13 Bullets and focusing on Laura Caxton. What are your plans with the character?

David: I can’t tell you anything! There’s a twist at the end of 99 Coffins so extreme and surprising I can’t give away any details of the next book without spoiling it all. I can tell you it’s going to be called Vampire Zero, and it’s a pure cataclysmic, blood and thunder, epic ending to the trilogy.

Matt: You publish your novels, serially, online. How does this affect your writing?

David: Much like writing for a mainstream audience at Penn State forced me to get outside my element and stretch my mental muscles, writing in serial form forced me to rethink all my preconceptions about how to tell a story. I had to learn how to write all over again, and in the process my work became so much stronger. When you write in short bursts every chapter has to end in a cliffhanger and you can’t let the action drop for a second (I think comic book writers will understand this perfectly). So it brought a whole level of energy and power to my work I’d never imagined before. I think if you go back and read my zombie novels, Monster Island, Monster Nation, and Monster Planet, you can watch the evolution as the stories just grow bigger and sicker and more fun with every page. It’s been a hoot!

Matt Knicl: My name is Matt Knicl. I'm a U of I alumn and one of those unemployed English majors Garrison Keillor likes to make fun of. I've been reading comics since high school and one day I would like to write them. My goal is to expose readers to what is out there in the world of comics and using my English powers, show what is worth reading or not. I can be reached at buzz.comics@gmail.com.